22 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 15, 2014
VIGILANCE DEPT.
ONE FATHER
Late last week, Nicholas Heyward, Sr.,
now fifty-seven and a lifelong res-
ident of the Gowanus Houses project,
in Boerum Hill, welcomed a visitor to
his apartment. Though he didn't feel
great---he'd caught a respiratory bug
and was taking antibiotics---he was
staying in motion. He wore jeans, white
sneakers, a long-sleeved gray T-shirt,
and, over that, a black T-shirt with
white lettering on the back that said
"Unarmed Civilian." On the front was
the familiar white outline of a body---a
corpse at a crime scene---surrounded by
the names, some more familiar than
others, of victims of police killings.
The previous morning, Heyward
had attended a press conference in City
Hall Park organized by New Yorkers
Against Bratton, a group formed a year
ago, following then Mayor-Elect Bill de
Blasio's announcement that William
Bratton would be returning as the city's
Police Commissioner. Heyward har-
bored acutely unhappy memories of
Bratton's previous tenure, from 1994 to
1996, and nothing since had altered his
opinion. Later that day, Heyward re-
turned to Manhattan, one among the
thousands of protesters who assembled
at the news that a Staten Island grand
jury had brought no indictment against
Daniel Pantaleo, the N.Y.P.D. o cer
who was videotaped last July putting
the unarmed Eric Garner in a choke
hold, which resulted in his death.
As he usually does at public gather-
ings, Heyward brought a school photo-
graph of his smiling son, Nicholas, Jr.,
who, in September, 1994, was shot and
killed in a Gowanus Houses stairwell
by an N.Y.P.D. housing o cer who
mistook a plastic toy gun for the real
thing. Nicholas, Jr., was thirteen years
old. There was no indictment then, ei-
ther, nor were any other charges filed.
During the twenty years since, Hey-
ward has existed between alternating
poles of disbelief and unblinking aware-
ness. As the weekend approached, he
anticipated attending both the wake
and the funeral of Akai Gurley, a twenty-
eight-year-old man who, two weeks
earlier, had also been shot and killed by
an N.Y.P.D. o cer in a public-housing
stairwell, at the Louis Pink Houses, in
East New York---an incident o cially
deemed an "accident."
"I could never believe in 1994 that I
would be doing this today," Heyward
said. "Speaking out about innocent peo-
ple being gunned down by the police. I
took a break from this for a couple of
years, from 2012 to 2014. It's painful to
be out there protesting and nothing's
happening. It's like the people you're
protesting to, the government o cials,
it's falling on deaf ears. It's not just be-
cause there was no indictment in the
Garner case---it's because of the number
of victims that have been killed prior to
that. Since the Amadou Diallo case"---
the unarmed West African immigrant
who, in 1999, was shot nineteen times by
four plainclothes o cers, all subse-
quently acquitted of second-degree
murder---"there have been two hundred
and sixty-five people killed by the police.
And then when they finally get a case
that's been videotaped, that all the world
witnessed, and still no wrongdoing on
the o cer's part? How could that be?"
He continued, alluding to the killing of
Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri,
"And not only in New York City---it's
happening all over."
Heyward excused himself, went to a
bedroom, and returned with a toy pop-
gun identical to the one that Nicholas,
Jr., and his friends were playing cops
and robbers with when he died. It was
on a generation of mostly young black and Latino New York-
ers but counterproductive. There were almost seven hundred
thousand stops in 2011. There have been fewer than fifty
thousand this year, and crime is still falling. De Blasio's recent
proposal to have the police deal with the possession of small
amounts of marijuana by issuing summonses, rather than by
making arrests, is designed to help reduce the disparities in ar-
rest rates and prevent arrest records from derailing young peo-
ple's job prospects and their futures. His announcement, on
Thursday, that every N.Y.P.D. o cer will take a retraining
course whose goals will include not letting "adrenaline" and
ego get the best of them is intended to help prevent deaths
like Eric Garner's.
The other law-enforcement imperative is the idea that
every precinct house and sheri 's o ce in the country must
hold the line against the next September 11th attack---and
the concurrent militarization of American policing. New
Yorkers are somewhat inured to this, in part because the city
is a place where anti-terrorism measures make particular
sense, although we are still caught short by reports of, say, un-
dercover units operating in mosques. The images from Fer-
guson, where military-style vehicles roamed the streets,
showed what policing had become, in an era when the Pen-
tagon sells military surplus to towns that lie far from any likely
terrorist threat. President Obama announced last week that
this program would be more closely regulated.
There is a need, however, for a di erent sort of review, one
that recognizes a national dilemma that goes beyond law en-
forcement. The Times recently cited comments that Loretta
Lynch made in 2000, a year after the Volpe trial, at a luncheon
of the Association of Black Women Attorneys. "We live in a
time where people fear the police," she said. "But we must also
understand that when people say they fear the police, as bad as
that is, they are also expressing an underlying fear, that when
they are confronted with the criminal element in our society
they will have no one to call upon to protect them. And that
feeling of vulnerability and utter helplessness is the worst feel-
ing that we can inflict upon fellow-members of our society."
A decade and a half later, that same sentiment could be
heard in protests throughout the city. Speaking after the
grand-jury decision in Staten Island, de Blasio, whose wife is
black, talked about their worries for their son, and said, "There
are so many families in this city that feel that each and every
night---is my child safe?" The question concerns the safety of
people who might simply fit a police o cer's conception of a
criminal. What we need to do now, perhaps, is learn to look at
each other through unbroken windows.
---Amy Davidson